Life and Letters of Robert Browning

M >> Mrs. Sutherland Orr >> Life and Letters of Robert Browning



In the course of 1842 he wrote the following note to Miss Flower,
evidently relating to the publication of her 'Hymns and Anthems'.


New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey: Tuesday morning.

Dear Miss Flower,--I am sorry for what must grieve Mr. Fox; for myself,
I beg him earnestly not to see me till his entire convenience, however
pleased I shall be to receive the letter you promise on his part.

And how can I thank you enough for this good news--all this music I
shall be so thoroughly gratified to hear? Ever yours faithfully, Robert
Browning.


His last letter to her was written in 1845; the subject being a concert
of her own sacred music which she was about to give; and again, although
more slightly, I anticipate the course of events, in order to give it
in its natural connection with the present one. Mr. Browning was
now engaged to be married, and the last ring of youthful levity had
disappeared from his tone; but neither the new happiness nor the new
responsibility had weakened his interest in his boyhood's friend. Miss
Flower must then have been slowly dying, and the closing words of the
letter have the solemnity of a last farewell.


Sunday.

Dear Miss Flower,--I was very foolishly surprized at the sorrowful
finical notice you mention: foolishly; for, God help us, how else is
it with all critics of everything--don't I hear them talk and see them
write? I dare-say he admires you as he said.

For me, I never had another feeling than entire admiration for your
music--entire admiration--I put it apart from all other English music I
know, and fully believe in it as _the_ music we all waited for.

Of your health I shall not trust myself to speak: you must know what
is unspoken. I should have been most happy to see you if but for a
minute--and if next Wednesday, I might take your hand for a moment.--

But you would concede that, if it were right, remembering what is now
very old friendship. May God bless you for ever (The signature has been
cut off.)


In the autumn of 1844 Mr. Browning set forth for Italy, taking ship, it
is believed, direct to Naples. Here he made the acquaintance of a young
Neapolitan gentleman who had spent most of his life in Paris; and they
became such good friends that they proceeded to Rome together. Mr.
Scotti was an invaluable travelling companion, for he engaged their
conveyance, and did all such bargaining in their joint interest as the
habits of his country required. 'As I write,' Mr. Browning said in a
letter to his sister, 'I hear him disputing our bill in the next room.
He does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have
used only two.' At Rome they spent most of their evenings with an
old acquaintance of Mr. Browning's, then Countess Carducci, and she
pronounced Mr. Scotti the handsomest man she had ever seen. He certainly
bore no appearance of being the least prosperous. But he blew out his
brains soon after he and his new friend had parted; and I do not think
the act was ever fully accounted for.

It must have been on his return journey that Mr. Browning went to
Leghorn to see Edward John Trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of
introduction. He described the interview long afterwards to Mr. Val
Prinsep, but chiefly in his impressions of the cool courage which Mr.
Trelawney had displayed during its course. A surgeon was occupied all
the time in probing his leg for a bullet which had been lodged there
some years before, and had lately made itself felt; and he showed
himself absolutely indifferent to the pain of the operation. Mr.
Browning's main object in paying the visit had been, naturally, to speak
with one who had known Byron and been the last to see Shelley alive; but
we only hear of the two poets that they formed in part the subject
of their conversation. He reached England, again, we suppose, through
Germany--since he avoided Paris as before.

It has been asserted by persons otherwise well informed, that on this,
if not on his previous Italian journey, Mr. Browning became acquainted
with Stendhal, then French Consul at Civita Vecchia, and that he imbibed
from the great novelist a taste for curiosities of Italian family
history, which ultimately led him in the direction of the Franceschini
case. It is certain that he profoundly admired this writer, and if he
was not, at some time or other, introduced to him it was because the
opportunity did not occur. But there is abundant evidence that no
introduction took place, and quite sufficient proof that none was
possible. Stendhal died in Paris in March 1842; and granting that he was
at Civita Vecchia when the poet made his earlier voyage--no certainty
even while he held the appointment--the ship cannot have touched there
on its way to Trieste. It is also a mistake to suppose that Mr. Browning
was specially interested in ancient chronicles, as such. This was one of
the points on which he distinctly differed from his father. He took his
dramatic subjects wherever he found them, and any historical research
which they ultimately involved was undertaken for purposes of
verification. 'Sordello' alone may have been conceived on a rather
different plan, and I have no authority whatever for admitting that it
was so. The discovery of the record of the Franceschini case was, as its
author has everywhere declared, an accident.

A single relic exists for us of this visit to the South--a shell picked
up, according to its inscription, on one of the Syren Isles, October
4, 1844; but many of its reminiscences are embodied in that vivid and
charming picture 'The Englishman in Italy', which appeared in the 'Bells
and Pomegranates' number for the following year. Naples always remained
a bright spot in the poet's memory; and if it had been, like Asolo, his
first experience of Italy, it must have drawn him in later years the
more powerfully of the two. At one period, indeed, he dreamed of it as a
home for his declining days.




Chapter 9

1844-1849

Introduction to Miss Barrett--Engagement--Motives for
Secrecy--Marriage--Journey to Italy--Extract of Letter from
Mr. Fox--Mrs. Browning's Letters to Miss Mitford--Life at
Pisa--Vallombrosa--Florence; Mr. Powers; Miss Boyle--Proposed British
Mission to the Vatican--Father Prout--Palazzo Guidi--Fano; Ancona--'A
Blot in the 'Scutcheon' at Sadler's Wells.



During his recent intercourse with the Browning family Mr. Kenyon had
often spoken of his invalid cousin, Elizabeth Barrett,* and had given
them copies of her works; and when the poet returned to England, late in
1844, he saw the volume containing 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship', which
had appeared during his absence. On hearing him express his admiration
of it, Mr. Kenyon begged him to write to Miss Barrett, and himself tell
her how the poems had impressed him; 'for,' he added, 'my cousin is a
great invalid, and sees no one, but great souls jump at sympathy.'
Mr. Browning did write, and, a few months, probably, after the
correspondence had been established, begged to be allowed to visit
her. She at first refused this, on the score of her delicate health and
habitual seclusion, emphasizing the refusal by words of such touching
humility and resignation that I cannot refrain from quoting them. 'There
is nothing to see in me, nothing to hear in me. I am a weed fit for the
ground and darkness.' But her objections were overcome, and their first
interview sealed Mr. Browning's fate.

* Properly E. Barrett Moulton-Barrett. The first of these
surnames was that originally borne by the family, but
dropped on the annexation of the second. It has now for
some years been resumed.

There is no cause for surprize in the passionate admiration with
which Miss Barrett so instantly inspired him. To begin with, he was
heart-whole. It would be too much to affirm that, in the course of his
thirty-two years, he had never met with a woman whom he could entirely
love; but if he had, it was not under circumstances which favoured the
growth of such a feeling. She whom he now saw for the first time had
long been to him one of the greatest of living poets; she was learned as
women seldom were in those days. It must have been apparent, in the most
fugitive contact, that her moral nature was as exquisite as her mind
was exceptional. She looked much younger than her age, which he only
recently knew to have been six years beyond his own; and her face was
filled with beauty by the large, expressive eyes. The imprisoned love
within her must unconsciously have leapt to meet his own. It would have
been only natural that he should grow into the determination to devote
his life to hers, or be swept into an offer of marriage by a sudden
impulse which his after-judgment would condemn. Neither of these things
occurred. The offer was indeed made under a sudden and overmastering
impulse. But it was persistently repeated, till it had obtained a
conditional assent. No sane man in Mr. Browning's position could have
been ignorant of the responsibilities he was incurring. He had, it
is true, no experience of illness. Of its nature, its treatment, its
symptoms direct and indirect, he remained pathetically ignorant to his
dying day. He did not know what disqualifications for active existence
might reside in the fragile, recumbent form, nor in the long years
lived without change of air or scene beyond the passage, not always even
allowed, from bed-room to sitting-room, from sofa to bed again. But he
did know that Miss Barrett received him lying down, and that his very
ignorance of her condition left him without security for her ever being
able to stand. A strong sense of sympathy and pity could alone entirely
justify or explain his act--a strong desire to bring sunshine into that
darkened life. We might be sure that these motives had been present with
him if we had no direct authority for believing it; and we have this
authority in his own comparatively recent words: 'She had so much need
of care and protection. There was so much pity in what I felt for her!'
The pity was, it need hardly be said, at no time a substitute for love,
though the love in its full force only developed itself later; but it
supplied an additional incentive.

Miss Barrett had made her acceptance of Mr. Browning's proposal
contingent on her improving in health. The outlook was therefore vague.
But under the influence of this great new happiness she did gain
some degree of strength. They saw each other three times a week; they
exchanged letters constantly, and a very deep and perfect understanding
established itself between them. Mr. Browning never mentioned his visits
except to his own family, because it was naturally feared that if
Miss Barrett were known to receive one person, other friends, or even
acquaintances, would claim admittance to her; and Mr. Kenyon, who was
greatly pleased by the result of his introduction, kept silence for the
same reason.

In this way the months slipped by till the summer of 1846 was drawing to
its close, and Miss Barrett's doctor then announced that her only chance
of even comparative recovery lay in spending the coming winter in the
South. There was no rational obstacle to her acting on this advice,
since more than one of her brothers was willing to escort her; but Mr.
Barrett, while surrounding his daughter with every possible comfort,
had resigned himself to her invalid condition and expected her also to
acquiesce in it. He probably did not believe that she would benefit by
the proposed change. At any rate he refused his consent to it. There
remained to her only one alternative--to break with the old home and
travel southwards as Mr. Browning's wife.

When she had finally assented to this course, she took a preparatory
step which, in so far as it was known, must itself have been
sufficiently startling to those about her: she drove to Regent's Park,
and when there, stepped out of the carriage and on to the grass. I do
not know how long she stood--probably only for a moment; but I well
remember hearing that when, after so long an interval, she felt earth
under her feet and air about her, the sensation was almost bewilderingly
strange.

They were married, with strict privacy, on September 12, 1846, at St.
Pancras Church.

The engaged pair had not only not obtained Mr. Barrett's sanction to
their marriage; they had not even invoked it; and the doubly clandestine
character thus forced upon the union could not be otherwise than
repugnant to Mr. Browning's pride; but it was dictated by the deepest
filial affection on the part of his intended wife. There could be no
question in so enlightened a mind of sacrificing her own happiness with
that of the man she loved; she was determined to give herself to him.
But she knew that her father would never consent to her doing so; and
she preferred marrying without his knowledge to acting in defiance of a
prohibition which, once issued, he would never have revoked, and which
would have weighed like a portent of evil upon her. She even kept the
secret of her engagement from her intimate friend Miss Mitford, and
her second father, Mr. Kenyon, that they might not be involved in its
responsibility. And Mr. Kenyon, who, probably of all her circle, best
understood the case, was grateful to her for this consideration.

Mr. Barrett was one of those men who will not part with their children;
who will do anything for them except allow them to leave the parental
home. We have all known fathers of this type. He had nothing to urge
against Robert Browning. When Mr. Kenyon, later, said to him that he
could not understand his hostility to the marriage, since there was no
man in the world to whom he would more gladly have given his daughter
if he had been so fortunate as to possess one,* he replied: 'I have no
objection to the young man, but my daughter should have been thinking of
another world;' and, given his conviction that Miss Barrett's state was
hopeless, some allowance must be made for the angered sense of fitness
which her elopement was calculated to arouse in him. But his attitude
was the same, under the varying circumstances, with all his daughters
and sons alike. There was no possible husband or wife whom he would
cordially have accepted for one of them.

* Mr. Kenyon had been twice married, but he had no children.

Mr. Browning had been willing, even at that somewhat late age, to study
for the Bar, or accept, if he could obtain it, any other employment
which might render him less ineligible from a pecuniary point of view.
But Miss Barrett refused to hear of such a course; and the subsequent
necessity for her leaving England would have rendered it useless.

For some days after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Browning returned to
their old life. He justly thought that the agitation of the ceremony
had been, for the moment, as much as she could endure, and had therefore
fixed for it a day prior by one week to that of their intended departure
from England. The only difference in their habits was that he did not
see her; he recoiled from the hypocrisy of asking for her under her
maiden name; and during this passive interval, fortunately short, he
carried a weight of anxiety and of depression which placed it among the
most painful periods of his existence.

In the late afternoon or evening of September 19, Mrs. Browning,
attended by her maid and her dog, stole away from her father's house.
The family were at dinner, at which meal she was not in the habit of
joining them; her sisters Henrietta and Arabel had been throughout in
the secret of her attachment and in full sympathy with it; in the case
of the servants, she was also sure of friendly connivance. There was no
difficulty in her escape, but that created by the dog, which might be
expected to bark its consciousness of the unusual situation. She took
him into her confidence. She said: 'O Flush, if you make a sound, I
am lost.' And Flush understood, as what good dog would not?--and crept
after his mistress in silence. I do not remember where her husband
joined her; we may be sure it was as near her home as possible. That
night they took the boat to Havre, on their way to Paris.

Only a short time elapsed before Mr. Barrett became aware of what had
happened. It is not necessary to dwell on his indignation, which at that
moment, I believe, was shared by all his sons. Nor were they the only
persons to be agitated by the occurrence. If there was wrath in the
Barrett family, there was consternation in that of Mr. Browning. He
had committed a crime in the eyes of his wife's father; but he had been
guilty, in the judgment of his own parents, of one of those errors which
are worse. A hundred times the possible advantages of marrying a Miss
Barrett could never have balanced for them the risks and dangers he
had incurred in wresting to himself the guardianship of that frail life
which might perish in his hands, leaving him to be accused of having
destroyed it; and they must have awaited the event with feelings never
to be forgotten.

It was soon to be apparent that in breaking the chains which bound her
to a sick room, Mr. Browning had not killed his wife, but was giving her
a new lease of existence. His parents and sister soon loved her dearly,
for her own sake as well as her husband's; and those who, if in a
mistaken manner, had hitherto cherished her, gradually learned, with one
exception, to value him for hers. It would, however, be useless to
deny that the marriage was a hazardous experiment, involving risks of
suffering quite other than those connected with Mrs. Browning's safety:
the latent practical disparities of an essentially vigorous and an
essentially fragile existence; and the time came when these were to make
themselves felt. Mrs. Browning had been a delicate infant. She had also
outgrown this delicacy and developed into a merry, and, in the harmless
sense, mischief-loving child. The accident which subsequently undermined
her life could only have befallen a very active and healthy girl.*
Her condition justified hope and, to a great extent, fulfilled it. She
rallied surprisingly and almost suddenly in the sunshine of her new
life, and remained for several years at the higher physical level: her
natural and now revived spirits sometimes, I imagine, lifting her beyond
it. But her ailments were too radical for permanent cure, as the weak
voice and shrunken form never ceased to attest. They renewed themselves,
though in slightly different conditions; and she gradually relapsed,
during the winters at least, into something like the home-bound
condition of her earlier days. It became impossible that she should
share the more active side of her husband's existence. It had to be
alternately suppressed and carried on without her. The deep heart-love,
the many-sided intellectual sympathy, preserved their union in rare
beauty to the end. But to say that it thus maintained itself as if by
magic, without effort of self-sacrifice on his part or of resignation on
hers, would be as unjust to the noble qualities of both, as it would be
false to assert that its compensating happiness had ever failed them.

* Her family at that time lived in the country. She was a
constant rider, and fond of saddling her pony; and one day,
when she was about fourteen, she overbalanced herself in
lifting the saddle, and fell backward, inflicting injuries
on her head, or rather spine, which caused her great
suffering, but of which the nature remained for some time
undiscovered.

Mr. Browning's troubles did not, even for the present, exhaust
themselves in that week of apprehension. They assumed a deeper reality
when his delicate wife first gave herself into his keeping, and the long
hours on steamboat and in diligence were before them. What she suffered
in body, and he in mind, during the first days of that wedding-journey
is better imagined than told. In Paris they either met, or were joined
by, a friend, Mrs. Anna Jameson (then also en route for Italy), and Mrs.
Browning was doubly cared for till she and her husband could once more
put themselves on their way. At Genoa came the long-needed rest in
southern land. From thence, in a few days, they went on to Pisa, and
settled there for the winter.

Even so great a friend as John Forster was not in the secret of Mr.
Browning's marriage; we learn this through an amusing paragraph in a
letter from Mr. Fox, written soon after it had taken place:


'Forster never heard of the Browning marriage till the proof of the
newspaper ('Examiner') notice was sent; when he went into one of his
great passions at the supposed hoax, ordered up the compositor to have a
swear at him, and demanded to see the MS. from which it was taken: so it
was brought, and he instantly recognised the hand of Browning's sister.
Next day came a letter from R. B., saying he had often meant to tell him
or write of it, but hesitated between the two, and neglected both.

'She was better, and a winter in Italy had been recommended some months
ago.

'It seems as if made up by their poetry rather than themselves.'


Many interesting external details of Mr. Browning's married life must
have been lost to us through the wholesale destruction of his letters to
his family, of which mention has been already made, and which he carried
out before leaving Warwick Crescent about four years ago; and Mrs.
Browning's part in the correspondence, though still preserved, cannot
fill the gap, since for a long time it chiefly consisted of
little personal outpourings, inclosed in her husband's letters and
supplementary to them. But she also wrote constantly to Miss Mitford;
and, from the letters addressed to her, now fortunately in Mr. Barrett
Browning's hands, it has been possible to extract many passages of a
sufficiently great, and not too private, interest for our purpose.
These extracts--in some cases almost entire letters--indeed constitute
a fairly complete record of Mr. and Mrs. Browning's joint life till
the summer of 1854, when Miss Mitford's death was drawing near, and the
correspondence ceased. Their chronological order is not always certain,
because Mrs. Browning never gave the year in which her letters were
written, and in some cases the postmark is obliterated; but the missing
date can almost always be gathered from their contents. The first letter
is probably written from Paris.


Oct. 2 ('46).

'. . . and he, as you say, had done everything for me--he loved me for
reasons which had helped to weary me of myself--loved me heart to heart
persistently--in spite of my own will . . . drawn me back to life and
hope again when I had done with both. My life seemed to belong to him
and to none other, at last, and I had no power to speak a word. Have
faith in me, my dearest friend, till you know him. The intellect is so
little in comparison to all the rest--to the womanly tenderness, the
inexhaustible goodness, the high and noble aspiration of every hour.
Temper, spirits, manners--there is not a flaw anywhere. I shut my eyes
sometimes and fancy it all a dream of my guardian angel. Only, if it had
been a dream, the pain of some parts of it would have wakened me before
now--it is not a dream. . . .'


The three next speak for themselves.


Pisa: ('46).

'. . . For Pisa, we both like it extremely. The city is full of beauty
and repose,--and the purple mountains gloriously seem to beckon us on
deeper into the vine land. We have rooms close to the Duomo, and leaning
down on the great Collegio built by Facini. Three excellent bed-rooms
and a sitting-room matted and carpeted, looking comfortable even for
England. For the last fortnight, except the last few sunny days, we have
had rain; but the climate is as mild as possible, no cold with all the
damp. Delightful weather we had for the travelling. Mrs. Jameson says
she won't call me improved but transformed rather. . . . I mean to know
something about pictures some day. Robert does, and I shall get him to
open my eyes for me with a little instruction--in this place are to be
seen the first steps of Art. . . .'



Pisa: Dec. 19 ('46).

'. . . Within these three or four days we have had frost--yes, and a
little snow--for the first time, say the Pisans, within five years.
Robert says the mountains are powdered towards Lucca. . . .'



Feb. 3 ('47).

'. . . Robert is a warm admirer of Balzac and has read most of his
books, but certainly he does not in a general way appreciate our French
people quite with my warmth. He takes too high a standard, I tell him,
and won't listen to a story for a story's sake--I can bear, you know, to
be amused without a strong pull on my admiration. So we have great wars
sometimes--I put up Dumas' flag or Soulie's or Eugene Sue's (yet he was
properly impressed by the 'Mysteres de Paris'), and carry it till my
arms ache. The plays and vaudevilles he knows far more of than I do,
and always maintains they are the happiest growth of the French school.
Setting aside the 'masters', observe; for Balzac and George Sand hold
all their honours. Then we read together the other day 'Rouge et Noir',
that powerful work of Stendhal's, and he observed that it was exactly
like Balzac 'in the raw'--in the material and undeveloped conception . . .
We leave Pisa in April, and pass through Florence towards the north of
Italy . . .'